Leave It to Me by Bharati Mukherjee

owner of an Asian-run market closed early for his daughter’s wedding. While celebratory firecrackers were being set off in Orinda, an elderly neighborhood woman was knocking on the store’s shuttered door looking for her usual small bag of scented kitty litter. The woman could have waited—the cat didn’t care—but she loved her cat Melba, named after an aunt, and so she embarked on a trek to the supermarket three long blocks away. She stepped off the curb without looking and was run over by a thirteen-year-old who’d stolen the car from in front of a 7-Eleven where the car’s owner was counting out enough change to pay for a Snickers bar and a quart of skim milk.
    The other week a refugee, just arrived in San Jose from Banja Luka by way of camps and detention centers, was stepping out of the third-floor offices of a relief organization with his care package of groceries, old clothes and used blankets when a shoot-out erupted between two just-formed girl gangs, the Pretenders and the Prissies, in the hallway, and a shot from a. 30-gauge Chinese-made pistol ricocheted off the elevator into his skull.
    The other month two high school dropouts from Stockton, hired for three grand by a cheated-upon wife to do a beat-to-a-pulp job on her pharmacist husband, were driving north on I-5 towards the drugstore when a highway patrolman stopped them for seat-belt and open-container violations. The pharmacist’s still dispensing pills and trying to work things out with his wife.
    We don’t paint the lines on our palms, says Madame Kezarina aka Linda Szymborska-Wakamatsu. My take is different. Convergence is coincidence.
    A daughter bumps into her runaway mother, what coincidence could be more natural?
    All the same, I call Fred Pointer at his office. He’s out of town, his tape tells the caller, but the caller may leave a brief message. “Give it to me fast, Fred,” I whisper into the tape, “and fuck the cost!”

I first encountered Ham’s old flame Jess in an upscale clothing store on Fillmore near Sacramento. Ham and I’d taken in a matinee at the Clay, and were ambling south towards Japantown for a bowl of soba . By then we’d slept together—“pleasured each other” was his phrase—a total of seven times.
    If Ham’s beat-up Triumph hadn’t been in the garage, if I hadn’t been leery of riding a bus or taxi that afternoon, neither of us would have thought of dashing into Dahlia’s Divan and trying on pricey silk caftans and harem pants and making nice to the designer, Dahlia Metz, who happened to be one of Ham’s many exes. Keeping the history of Ham’s bawdy relationships straight was tough. Dahlia struck me as a wider-bodied Rosearme in stretch-velvet tunic and pants. She’d discovered her talent, she explained, in a women’s prison in Afghanistan way back when everyone who was anyone put in time in Turkish or Afghan prisons. I wasn’t sure if Dahlia’s talent-discovery experience had come before or after her marriage with Ham. She pulled a layered dress off a rack, and held it against my chest. “Perfect,” she said to Ham’s mirrored reflection. “I call it the Seven Veils Dance, so watch out, Ham!”
    I grabbed the wispy end of the outermost layer, andtwisted it around a forearm. “ Bodacious bodywear for audacious amateurs  …” I caught myself before I’d said, And Frankie, now your turn!
    Dahlia experimented on me the many ways of wrapping or draping the Seven Veils dress.
    Ham came through. He didn’t have quite the Fong flair, but for a novice he wasn’t at all bad. He said, “After debauched days and delectable nights, the veiled Virgin of Varanasi whipped out a scimitar and whacked off the ponytailed pate of the perpetrator.”
    “The maharani,” I shouted, “and the maidservant make out on a mustard-hued mattress while pesky pachyderms pirouette …”
    “ Meanwhile the cuckolded codger carries his carbine and takes cracks at crocodiles and cranes, and his cantankerous